Participants of distributed gaming, have experienced areas of expansion in recent years. These participants are enabled to play new games and play existing games in novel ways. For example, games today are often played by several participants simultaneously over remote networks. Distributed gaming already takes a variety of forms including Internet and/or online games, as well as simple participation events, such as audience polling. Existing distributed games already pose issues in game management and control. However, several of the complex issues with distributed games have only become more difficult with the expansion into new areas and ways of gaming. One issue involves communication with the participants. Another issue is the ability to scale for large numbers of participants. These two issues make the fundamental task of keeping all the participants updated, into a significant challenge. One approach to address these issues is one-way broadcast updating. However, this broadcast or multicast approach presents significant security challenges.
Games of skill and chance have an intrinsic excitement and entertainment value. Any game is greatly enhanced by a participant's ability to know how their performance compares in relation to other participants and/or to historical performance for the game throughout the contest. However, competition will naturally create incentives to enhance performance in a manner outside the rules of the game, i.e., to cheat. Some games provide a lucrative prize based on performance, which creates even greater incentives to break the rules of the game. Network based games over the Internet, television, radio, or other complex technology utilizing a one-way multicast or broadcast system create more complicated issues in detection and prevention of cheating. Unlike a server controlled contest, there are a variety of ways unobserved competitive participants are able to unfairly manipulate a game that has such a broadcast architecture.
The State of the Art
There have been various attempts to address some of the issues raised above. Some of these attempts are mentioned below.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,013,038, filed Dec. 8, 1989, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,120,076, filed Apr. 25, 1991, both to Luxemberg, et al., (the Luxemberg patents) are directed to reducing the number of telephone calls to the game server only after the conclusion of a game. The Luxemberg '076 patent in particular, directs all but a sampling of players to delay sending their scores to the central server in a multicast request after the conclusion of the game. The central server compiles the results of the sampling and broadcasts the sampling results to all the participants of the game. Each participant then determines the participant's own chance of winning based on the sampling results taken at the conclusion of the game. Only those participants whose performance is high enough in comparison to the sampling results are released to send their results to the server for scoring. Thus, in the Luxemberg '076 patent, the number of messages over a landline telephone call to the game server is reduced to the number of participants in the sample. The game server determines the winners at the conclusion of the contest based on the uploaded scores from only the participants who have a chance of winning and who have thus uploaded their scores to the server. The Luxemberg patents ('038 and '076) also provide for the collection of market information surveys after conclusion of the game. However, the Luxemberg patents suffer from lack of real-time capability as participants must wait for each of the sample participants to dial-in their results over telephone lines. The Luxemberg patents also suffer from the inability to specifically select and connect with a statistical sample.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,083,800, filed Jun. 7, 1990, to Lockton describes using a one-way FM subcarrier (SCA) channel to broadcast from the server to game participants, while the game participants upload through telephone lines. U.S. Pat. No. 5,479,492, filed Dec. 1, 1993, to Hofstee, et al., describes voting in response to a television or radio broadcast by using a ballot box attached to a telephone line that introduces a time delay. U.S. Pat. No. 5,643,088, filed May 31, 1995, to Vaughn, et al., describes interleaved interactive advertising in the broadcasts. U.S. Pat. No. 5,813,913, filed May 30, 1995, to Berner, et al. (Berner) describes a system where players are grouped according to skill level for competition and comparison within a particular skill level. In Berner, the central computer system sends a lockout signal at the conclusion of each game where only players of the particular skill level update their performance through telephone lines.
However, none of these attempts provide for real time updating, to large numbers of participants, information regarding the standings of a game, particularly over new types of networks. One such network that shows promise is a network for mobile devices such as a cellular network. Moreover, none of the prior techniques address the issues particular to mobile device gaming such as the unfair manipulation of technology.